Memories of glory glory glory years at Liverpool FC

Apologies for relative silence of late. However, fantastic new podcast on the way soon with a little freebie sampler for you schnorrers unable to spare the nugatory £3.50 fee, and presumably not drinking coffee any more either.

I have a number of personal issues that have kept me from posting at my normal prolific rate, the key one being a slow puncture - in the car that is, front offside tyre - but further complicating factors are my standing in on the weekend overnights on TalkSport, and also the fact that News UK have introduced a new invoicing portal that is making getting paid more time consuming than doing the actual work.

On which general topic I have a multiple choice question to pose, with just two choices:

When some system that you have been using for some time on one of your devices changes, is it:

(a) To make it easier, quicker, and more convenient for you, the user.

or

(b) To further enrich some billionaire already making more money than a horse has hairs - to quote my good friends Dr Hook - from the technology.

To take part in the quiz, you’ll need to download the Martin Kelner app as long as you have the very latest operating system.

Meanwhile, here’s an ancient piece I wrote for my Screen Break column in The Guardian. It’s about a show on Sky Sports on which legends of sport shared their stories (to get more of these just download the Martin Kelner Sporting Legends app, where for a small fee you can get the stories with no adverts).

I found the article while looking for a tune my house band did for me in the style of the great man Ennio Morricone. So I did a search for ‘Morricone’ and up it came - not what I was looking for obviously - but this piece, its vintage underlined by the fact that only Chris Lawler of the legends is still with us (good on you Chris, 82).

Not a classic piece, I confess. Those are in my book Wrestling In Honey, a few copies of which are still available. But I’m posting it on here as a holding tactic to keep some of you interested (paying customers down from 128 to 127)

Enjoy

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I love football stories from the old days, but normally you have to overpay for a roast chicken breast and some comedian who’s dropped off the circuit doing the warm-up to enjoy them.

Now, though, Sky Sports has had the smart idea of bringing the best of the after-dinner circuit into the comfort of our very own living rooms in Time of Our Lives, a six-part nostalgia-fest featuring legends of the game.

The term legend, of course, is a fairly flexible one in sports broadcasting, but The Shankly Years, the first in the series, boasted a fund of great anecdotes about the eponymous genuine article.

Ian St. John, Chris Lawler, and Ron Yeats, who between them played 1200 games for Bill Shankly’s Liverpool in the 1960s and early ‘70s, gathered in a studio under the tutelage of Jeff Stelling to share memories of the great man (Shanks, that is, not Stelling), only occasionally straying into Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen territory, mainly on the topic of the former Liverpool boss’s cavalier attitude to health and safety.

Yeats told the story of defender Gerry Byrne, who had to be careful not to take throw-ins after he appeared for the second half of a cup final with a broken collar-bone, and all three guests agreed Shankly’s attitude to injuries was what you might call a touch old-school.

He feared any player carrying an injury might infect the others, so his solution was to banish him to the far corner of the training field, adjacent apparently to a pigsty. If Shanks saw a player on the treatment table – even one of his trusted lieutenants – he would shun him.

This might explain why Lawler missed only three games in seven seasons. When Shankly once saw Lawler wearing a crepe bandage on the advice of a physiotherapist, the manager barked: “What’s wrong with the malingerer?” The full back was pretty sure he was not joking.

There was little more to the programme than the three ex-players sitting in armchairs telling their stories - no archive footage, no expert views, and only a brief clip of Shankly himself – and yet the hour flew by for those of us not overly familiar with the material.

Shankly believed all foreigners were “cheats and liars,” according to St. John. When Liverpool played at Inter Milan in the semi-final of the 1965 European Cup, said St. John, they stayed by Lake Como, and Shankly was convinced the bells at the little church up the hill were being deliberately rung to keep his players awake. So he walked up to the church with his assistant Bob Paisley, and asked if the ringing could be stopped.

When the Monsignor told him they had rung like that for centuries, Shankly asked if Paisley could muffle them. “He wanted Bob to climb up into the tower and bandage the bells,” chuckled St. John.

Shankly was deeply suspicious of coaching manuals, said St John. “He said if you need to read a book to know about football, you shouldn’t be in the game,” and yet, according to the former Liverpool forward, he introduced the flat back four to British football.

To say Shankly was single-minded is rather like saying Oscar Wilde was a little flamboyant. He would turn up at the training ground for five-aside games (Shankly, that is, not Oscar Wilde)* even after his retirement in 1974, when Paisley took over. Eventually he had to be asked to stay away to avoid confusing the players as to who the boss actually was.

There was undoubtedly a childlike quality to Shankly, which helped his teams, in the current managerial cliché of choice, play with a smile on their face. Recently, Harry Redknapp and Joe Kinnear have both been said to have put back the smile on their players’ faces, and now Nigel Clough, taking over at Derby, told Sky he “needed to get a smile on their face.”

Yet, with the possible exception of Dwight Yorke, I have never seen a single footballer play with a smile on his face, and if one did, you would be inclined - unless you were Bill Shankly - to refer him to your sports psychologist.

Finally, how can you have a darts tournament on TV without Chase The Sun by Planet Funk? That is the catchy da da da da da dum tune they play after each leg of the PDC darts on Sky. It does not appear at the BDO championships on the BBC, which to my mind is like The Third Man without the zither, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly without Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack. And as there is no Sid Waddell at the BDO darts, nor any Phil Taylor, make that The Third Man without Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly without Clint Eastwood.

*For reasons of economy, in these difficult times, some jokes are being re-used in the same piece. Thanks for your understanding.